"Chief Harold Hurtt today said it's another way
of combatting crime amid a shortage of officers.

Scott Henson with the American Civil Liberties Union
calls Hurtt's proposal to require surveillance cameras as part of some building
permits -- "radical and extreme."

In the meantime, Homeland Security grants are being
used to blanket major cities and even small sleepy communities with arsenals
of spy cameras.

All over the United States, Canada and Britain, surveillance
camera systems are being installed on street corners, in public bathrooms,
in residential neighborhoods, and even in parks and forests. We are asked
to trust the government underlings who control
them that they are working for our best interests as said underlings are
caught
using the cameras to spy on naked women in their homes.

Homeland Security funding is being utilized to fund
this mass expansion of the surveillance state in the US as city and state
officials clamor at the teat of Big Brother to milk the cash cow of the
police state and win the contracts for installing more and more sophisticated
spy cameras.

The government demands to know everything about our
private lives and catalogue, file and index every aspect of our existence,
yet government itself becomes more and more secret with each passing day
as it engages in escalating criminal activities.

The agenda behind surveillance cameras is not simply
to track the movements of certain individuals. There are not enough watchers
to catalogue all the information. The cameras are about behavior control
and creating an omnipresent atmosphere whereby the citizen consciously regulates
his own behavior so as not to seem suspicious. The surveillance cameras
are there to make a statement. We are the prison guards, you are the prisoners.

As George Orwell described it in 1984,

"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously.
Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would
be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of
vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard."

"There was of course no way of knowing whether
you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system,
the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was
even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate
they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live --
did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every
sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized."

This is the prison without bars. This is the panopticon,
a prison so constructed that the inspector can see each of the prisoners
at all times, without being seen. This is a portrait of the accelerating
movement by western governments to erect giant, powerful, all-pervading
mass surveillance, tracking and control grids that will keep all populations
firmly under the baleful and watchful gaze of Big Brother.